Category: Life

At work, three of our four incoming lines were formerly residential lines, and we have become accustomed to two or three telephone solicitations per line per day, usually robocalls.   Even when one just ignores the line because it isn’t the main number, it is still very annoying and a break in one’s concentration.  

Tuesday, I finally took the time to enter the three lines into the National Do Not Call Registry. I didn’t expect to see any effect for the month or so that the law allows the telemarketers to scrub their lists, but today we had just one  non-legitimate call.  I’ll be very interested to see if this is just a fluke.

We have Mirra Chairs at work. These chairs won out over the better known Aeron Chairs after we tested both for a week, courtesy of a local dealer.  Last week, since I was experiencing some shoulder tension after work, I searched to make sure that I had everything properly adjusted, and found a web-site supporting something I had long suspected: there are pros and cons to all ergonomic products. I ended up trying to follow the tips in “How to Keep Good Posture When In Front of a Computer at Ririan Project” and also found “Rethinking ergonomic sitting and seating ergonomics” interesting.

The net result seems to be that sitting for long periods of time is bad for the body, and taking frequent breaks is a necessity.  And something I am doing is helping:  I haven’t noticed the shoulder tension in the evenings the past few days.

We took the tree down this afternoon.  This was scheduled for last weekend before I found an OLPC XO  on my door step. 

I take off the ornaments and box them.  I am very fussy about it, because I have some highly breakable ornaments and I want to make sure that I wrap them securely.  I do the fragile ones first, so if I get tired by the end of the process it won’t matter if I am just tempted to throw the sturdy ones into the box.  We have ten document boxes full of decorations. I like the document box because they stack easily and are reasonably sturdy.  The most fragile ornaments are in boxes within the boxes. 

As an experiment, we put the tree in the sitting room this year because I knew we would be having a big sit down dinner on Christmas Eve.  However, we decided that we will probably not use the sitting room again.  Usually, when we put the tree in the dining room (originally the living room of our house until we repurposed it) we can see the tree from several rooms.  In the sitting room, we could only see it when we were going in and out of the mud room, and I missed being able to see it as we moved around the house. (Our sitting room is like the traditional parlor in that we don’t use it unless we have company.)  

The obituary for my father-in-law, John Heneghan, appeared in the Washington Post yesterday.  Although I knew he had been been involved in promoting civil rights in the south in the sixties, I had never realized he had been part of the Freedom Summer in 1964.